Claude,
before we talk in detail about what you and your crewmates on
STS-103 are going to do, I'd like to talk a little bit about what
you have done. You have a job that a lot of people have dreamed
about having. Why did you want to be an astronaut? Where is it
in your life that the desire to fly in space, or to explore, where
does that come from?

My first
dream as a child was to become a pilot. My second dream was to
become an astronomer, and I pursued in parallel efforts and studies
in these two areas. I became a pilot with the Swiss Air Force,
and I became an astronomer after studies in Lausanne and Geneva
University in Switzerland. I became both. Of course, at the time
when Gagarin flew in space in 1961, I was 17 years old. When Armstrong
and Aldrin set foot on the moon in the summer of 1969, I was 25
years old. At that time, I thought that space exploration was
reserved for Soviets and for Americans. I didn't think that, as
a Swiss, it was possible to do that, although I was really dreaming
to do that. It was an impossible dream. It was only about in the
mid-70s, when the European Space Agency decided to collaborate
with the United States in the human exploration of space in the
frame of the Spacelab program, together with the shuttle program
in development, that I saw a possibility for me to become an astronaut.
Then I had a new dream, to become an astronaut. Shortly after
the European Space Agency announced that they were looking for
European astronauts at the end of the 70s, I signed up, but I
went to visit people at the European Space Agency Headquarters
in Paris. My name was on the list very early after these announcements
were made through the newspapers in Europe. Then, it became my
new dream, and I'm very fortunate that this dream became reality
in 1978 when I was selected in the first group of European astronauts.
Then, I came here in 1980 to be one of the two European Mission
Specialists in training, the first non-Americans to do astronaut
training here at the Johnson Space Center. And then it went on and on, and I flew for the first time in 1992, twelve years after
I started training here, and I flew three missions so far. So
my first dream was to become a pilot, to become an astronomer;
I became both. Then, much later, my next dream was to become an
astronaut, and I was fortunate to realize that dream, also.

Are
there certain memorable persons or events in your life that you
can look back at and credit with helping you get to where you
are today?

I would say
the most help I got was from my dad. My dad is a civil engineer
in Switzerland; he's 90 years old now, so he's no longer active
as a civil engineer, but still a very active person. He influenced
me in the sense that I have the feeling that what I wanted to
do is what he had wanted to do but could not because, when he
was a teenager or in his mid-20s, aviation was at its beginning.
It was really an era of pioneering in aviation, and very few people
were becoming pilots and obviously even less, astronauts. Later
when I started my first step towards becoming a pilot and an astronomer,
I could feel very well that I was realizing his dream and that
his dream was realized through my activities. He supported me
very strongly always. He always was very keen in telling me that
it is necessary to produce an effort towards reaching a goal.
I remember when we were going to ski during the weekends in Switzerland,
he was telling me, "You can take a cable car to go up the
mountain, and then come down skiing. But sometimes you need to
go up by yourself, also, and you will see the reward when you
come down. You'll have a much better feeling if you have gone
up yourself before coming down." This is a lesson that I
always kept in myself, and it helped me a lot in all my career
steps towards becoming an astronaut.

You're
now assigned to a shuttle mission that's been put together on
comparatively short notice for an early servicing mission to the
Hubble Space Telescope. Can you, at first, summarize for me your
role in this mission, and talk about what it's like for you to
be a part of this particular flight?

I feel very
privileged to be part of this mission, and when my nomination
was announced, I was really very, very happy to be selected for
this mission. Hubble is very close to my heart, and going back
to Hubble, because I was there once already in 1993, is really
[a] great privilege for me. This time I will be an EVA crewmember,
a spacewalking crewmember, and out of the four spacewalks to do
planned repairs and improvements on the Hubble Space Telescope
together with Mike Foale, I will be doing two of them. So this
is really my major role. I will also be assisting the robotic
system operator, on one hand, in the capture of the telescope
and the release of the telescope after completion of the repair
and maintenance work. Also, I will help him-Jean-François
Clervoy-as an RMS operator during the spacewalks of my two other
colleagues Steve Smith and John Grunsfeld. So my two major roles will be, first of all, as an EVA crewmember, and another important
role as support to RMS operation or robotic system operations.

When
you were first assigned to this mission, more than a year ago,
you and your spacewalking colleagues expected to have about two
years to train for a mission that was going to involve six spacewalks.
Earlier this year, of course, you found out that those plans had
changed. Tell us about how you got that news and how the reality
of the change has made a difference in how you all are preparing.

We got the
news at the end of February this year and early March, when we
had the failure of the third out of six gyroscopes in Hubble.
Obviously, since that time, Hubble has been functioning with three
gyroscopes, which is a minimum necessary to do science. We felt
like there may be a possibility that we might have to go early
in case another gyroscope was going to fail. In fact, it developed
rather rapidly at the end of February and early March. We got
the message that the decision was made to perform an earlier servicing
mission number three, or better said, maybe to split servicing
mission number three in two. [We would] have one early in order
to-as soon as practically possible-replace all gyroscopes on board
Hubble in case of a failure of another gyroscope and do some other
important maintenance and repairs on Hubble that I can talk about
later. Then, [we would] have the second half of the third servicing
mission about a year or year and a half later to replace one of
the cameras, to replace the solar arrays, and do some other work
in terms of cooling of some of the existing scientific instruments.
For the four spacewalkers already in training, doing evaluation
and engineering runs in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab here at Johnson, and [visiting] Goddard Space Flight Center since the summer of
1998, it meant that suddenly the pace of our activity picked up
quite a bit. In mid-March, we only had about six months to flight,
so it's a very short time to get ready for a relatively complex
space shuttle mission. So the pace picked up quite a bit, but
I must say this is very exciting. I'm very happy to be part of
that.

As
you mentioned a moment ago, you have seen the Hubble Space Telescope
up close once before, on STS-61. Has your firsthand experience
with this telescope helped you and your current crewmates get
prepared for the tasks on this mission?

I think it
did. In fact, I had the chance, on the first Hubble Space Telescope
Servicing Mission in December, 1993, to be, on one hand, the flight
engineer on board and the robotic system operator, the role that
Jean-François Clervoy, another ESA astronaut, will have
on this mission. Of course, I didn't train for any of the EVA
tasks that we performed at that time, but I was still working
pretty close to my crewmates who were going to go EVA and who
went EVA, in the sense that I was responsible for moving them
from one place to the other above the cargo bay and toward the
telescope to perform their task. I did a number of runs as a scuba
diver when they were doing their practice runs in the large water
basin at Marshall Space Flight Center. Right now we do this here
at Johnson. So I was relatively familiar with the EVA task, but I was, of course, quite familiar, because it was my major responsibility,
with the robotic system tasks. In a way, now, I'm going to be
at the other end of the arm, if I can say, and maybe the contribution
that I was able to bring to this mission is in that area-the cooperation
between the EVA crewmember and the RMS operator to perform the
job. It's really a so-called EVR activity, in the sense that there
is EVA, on one hand, which is a major tool to perform the repair,
but together with robotics. In fact, we will assemble the whole
space station using also EVR means. The first Hubble Space Telescope
Servicing Mission, mission number 61 in December '93, was, in
a way, the first mission where, from the shuttle, we used a total
EVR scenario to do major maintenance and repair work on a scientific
satellite or instrument on orbit. So I think this experience that
I had in December '93, I brought it to the team this time. I helped
somewhat, mainly for EVA number 4 for our mission, which was quite
poorly defined initially, to redefine it from an EVR point of
view and from the point of view of the various attitudes and geometries
of the arm to perform the task.

Specifically
on that point, did your experience allow you to offer any particular
tips or insights to Jean-François Clervoy about how to
operate that large arm around that huge telescope?

Well, a little
bit, but Jean-François is so talented that I didn't have
to bring him a lot of information because he grasped all of this
very rapidly. Still, we talked quite a lot at the beginning of
the training, in March and early April, about how we're going
to do it: what terminology we were going to use between the EVA
crewmember and the RMS operator to have a clear indication of
where he wanted to go, what attitude his body had to have, and
the changes in the position of his body to perform a certain delicate
task on the telescope. So we worked together, but once again Jean-François
has a lot of talent. I'm very impressed with the quality of his
work, and I know he will be doing a perfect job on the mission.

To
help set the stage for us all to understand the job you and your
crewmates are going to do, let me get you to talk for a moment
about the mission of Hubble. What is it that the Hubble Space
Telescope can do that telescopes on the ground, or even other
telescopes in orbit, cannot do?

If you have
an astronomical instrument on orbit outside of the atmosphere,
the radiation that you are studying, whether it comes from a star,
from interstellar matter, from a planet, from a galaxy, or some
kind of exotic object far away in the universe, doesn't go through
the atmosphere. The atmosphere, on one hand, blocks a lot of the
radiation. It blocks all of the gamma rays, the x-rays, the ultraviolet.
It blocks a good part of the infrared, also. So you have available
the whole spectrum of radiation, and finally, we learn about these
objects in the universe mainly through the radiation they send
us. So it's much more information that you get when you do observations
of celestial objects from space compared to observations from
the ground. On the other hand, the atmosphere is an inhomogeneous
[medium]. It has always turbulence, and this turbulence and lack
of homogeneity of this medium, which is transparent in the visible
part of the spectrum, is such that the resolution or the accuracy
of the picture that you get at the focus of a telescope on the
ground, even from a mountaintop observatory, is limited by the
atmosphere itself. So these are the two advantages of having a
telescope in space: on one hand, you get much better resolution,
or accuracy, of the pictures, which means you can see further
away for a given size of a telescope, and you have accessible
the whole spectrum. In the case of Hubble, beyond the visible
part of the [spectrum], which is accessible from the ground, you
can go quite far in the ultraviolet and somewhat in the infrared,
also. So you get more information about the object you study because
you have a wider spectrum available. Of course, one of the great
benefits of Hubble (and this has brought us incredible results
over the last nine years of operation, especially after the first
servicing mission that restored the optical quality of the telescope
that was [caused] by the somewhat flawed shape of the primary
mirror), is it has brought us incredible results about the faraway
universe, about planetary surfaces, about birth and death of stars.
It has been [an] incredible instrument.

Can
you further characterize the value of the data - the pictures
- that Hubble has brought to us so far and presumably would continue
to do?

The spectrum
of the studies made with Hubble is very wide. We look at relatively
close-by objects like planetary surfaces, and the pictures we
get of the surface of Mars, for instance, are really incredible.
Since we had visits [to] Mars by planetary probes that got very
far, landed on the surface and, of course, that gave us extremely
detailed pictures of Mars, we have not had any picture with the
level of detail that we have with Hubble. So we have a constant
monitoring of planetary surfaces-in particular, Mars-and other
planetary surfaces-for instance, the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus, and Neptune-with the Hubble Space Telescope. This is a
great benefit for regular follow-up of what's going on in the
atmosphere of these large planets like beyond planet Mars. This
is the close part of the studies of the Hubble Space Telescope.
If I go to the other extreme, the studies of the early universe
and of objects that are very far away and objects that we see
as they were a very long time ago, we have been able, especially
with the Hubble Deep Field (an exposure that was taken during
ten days at the end of 1995 which is the deepest picture of the
universe that has ever been taken by any telescope in the history
of humankind) we see objects that are about 10,000,000,000 light-years
away. That means that, not only [do] we see very deep in the universe,
but [that] we see very deep in the past of our universe. We see
these objects as they were 10,000,000,000 years ago which is not
too many billion years after the Big Bang so we've been going
down, or going back in time further away than we have ever been
able to do before. I think these are incredibly valuable results,
and we look forward to the continuation of incredible science
with Hubble over the next few years, and of course a continuation
with the Next Generation Space Telescope beyond 2008, when Hubble
will be slowly replaced with an even more capable instrument.
This is very, very exciting.

The
Hubble program is a cooperative effort between NASA and the European
Space Agency. Talk about the involvement of ESA in the Hubble
effort and the part ESA has played and continues to play in the
development and operation of this telescope.

From the
beginning on the European Space Agency was part of that program;
in fact it's a joint program of NASA and the European Space Agency
with about 15% contribution of the European Space Agency to this
project. Initially, the European Space Agency provided the solar
arrays, which are responsible for transforming the solar radiation
into electrical power [for] the on-board systems of Hubble. Also,
ESA provided one of the focal instruments, the so-called Faint
Object Camera, which is still on board the telescope at this time
and will be replaced on the fourth servicing mission, which is
the second part of the third servicing mission, by an Advanced
Camera for Surveys. So ESA contributed from the beginning in the
systems of the Hubble Space Telescope, and of course, in return,
the European astronomers receive a similar fraction of observing
time on the telescope. In fact, the European astronomers have
received a little more than 15% of the observation time. It's
about 20%. All this activity of the European astronomers is coordinated
through a facility in Garching, near Munchen in Germany. It's
called Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility, which,
by the way, is located at the headquarters of the European Southern
Observatory. The European Southern Observatory [is] responsible
for the manufacture and management and utilization of several
large telescopes in the southern hemisphere, in Chile. I must
say, it's very good that we have these two organizations co-located
because there's a lot of exchange of information and joint programs
between the team utilizing the Hubble Space Telescope in Europe
and the people using these large telescopes in Chile, in particular
the Very Large Telescope, a set of four eight-meter-diameter mirror
telescopes located in Mount Paranal in northern Chile. There's
been a lot-and there will be even more so in the future-of cooperative
studies between ground-based telescopes which, of course, suffer
from what I was talking about. They look through the atmosphere,
so they suffer from these problems. But they are very large telescopes,
and they collect more light than Hubble can collect. They are
eight-meter-diameter telescopes, so they collect much more light.
So there's a very interesting synergy between these two approaches
to astronomy, and we are fortunate that in Europe these two are
co-located and work together very closely.

Another
question from a broader outlook: Hubble is the first of four components
of NASA's Great Observatories program, already followed to orbit
by the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and just recently the Chandra
X-ray Observatory, with an infrared telescope still to come. Can
you give us a sense of the value, if not the necessity, of having
several telescopes to investigate different parts of the spectrum
of light in order for astronomers to really learn about the nature
of the cosmos?

Again, if
you can study a wide part of the spectrum, you can get more information
about the objects that populate the universe, and, technically
speaking, we cannot have a telescope that can study objects in
the gamma ray part of the spectrum and at the same time the infrared
because these are completely different technologies. Not only
the detectors at the focus of the telescope, but all the imaging
system is of a different nature. So we cannot have a telescope
that observes the total spectrum of radiation. So we need to have
different instruments to study different parts of the spectrum.
And the benefit of having all the spectrum available, I mentioned
already before, is that you get the information from celestial
objects through radiation so if you can have access to the full
spectrum you get more information. In general, the objects in
the universe that are very high-energy objects, or the processes
that are high-energy processes, will radiate more in the short
wavelength range towards the gamma rays or the x-rays. The objects
that are of moderate energy, like our sun or most of the stars
that we see in the night sky with the naked eye, are objects in
which relatively moderate energy processes are taking place. And
they radiate in the visible part of the spectrum or somewhat toward
the ultraviolet or the infrared. Objects that are very cool and
objects where low-energy physical processes take place radiate
more in the long wavelength part of the spectrum; they radiate
in the far infrared or in the millimeter radiation, or even the
radio waves. So, in general, with this ability to observe the
whole spectrum of radiation, we can observe the whole range of
physical processes from the high-energy processes, covered with
the x-ray and gamma ray observatories, through the medium range
energy processes, covered with Hubble Space Telescope and later
with the "next generation" Hubble Space Telescope. Of
course, in the low-energy processes, we have Hubble to a certain
degree because it can see some in the infrared but not very far.
The future infrared space telescope will cover that area in a
much more efficient manner. And also the Next Generation Space
Telescope, which will be located much further away from the Earth
than the Hubble Space Telescope presently is, will also explore
the infrared part of the spectrum. As far as the radio waves part
of the spectrum, we can do these adequately from the ground because
the atmosphere is basically transparent to our radio waves.

For
Hubble to continue to make its contribution in this effort there
is a servicing mission going now, a little earlier than was originally
planned due to the failure of gyroscopes on board the telescope.
You mentioned it earlier, but let me ask you to do it again. What
is it that the gyroscopes on Hubble do, and why has the failure
of these pieces of equipment prompted NASA to take the unusual
step of flying this mission so much earlier than planned?

The gyroscopes
are part of the guidance control system of the Hubble Space Telescope.
There are many elements in this control loop for the guidance
of Hubble. On one hand, to be able to go from one direction in
the sky to study such an object to another direction to study
another object, and on the other hand to be able to maintain accurately
the position in space. In fact, Hubble is able to maintain its
position in space, or its attitude in space, with an accuracy
of seven-thousandths of an arc second, which is a very remarkable
achievement. We need several elements in order to be able to control
the attitude of Hubble. We need gyroscopes, on one hand, which
keep constant position in space once they are spinning fast. We
have several types of gyroscopes on board Hubble, including these
Rate Sensor Units that we have to exchange. We have also gyroscopes
that are massive gyroscopes that are used as reaction wheels,
against which a telescope reacts in order to change its attitude
from one direction to another one. We have the Fine Guidance Sensors,
one of which we will exchange out of three. Another one we changed
on the last servicing mission, and on the fourth servicing mission
in 2003 or 2004, the third one will be exchanged. So, the gyroscopes
that we'll exchange are part of a control system that is responsible
for maintaining an accurate attitude of Hubble in space to perform
its scientific duty-it's a very important element, obviously…absolutely
indispensable to do science.

Yet
the telescope was launched with backups for these systems. Why
have the failures up to this point necessitated the early response?

It has backups
in the sense that we have six of these gyroscopes, and we need
three to properly do science. It happens that we had failures.
The telescope has been in orbit [for] nine years, and we had failures
of these. In fact, there are failures in very thin electrical
wires or leads that provide power to these gyros. It happens that
in the gyroscopes that we will replace, all the replacement gyroscopes
have some modification that will make it much less likely for
these leads to be damaged and break after a while. So the redundancy
of the system will be certainly improved. Although we only have
three gyros that failed, we will replace all six with gyroscopes
that are designed in such a way that the future failure likelihood
will certainly go down. I'm pretty sure, I hope at least, that
these gyroscopes that we will exchange will take Hubble to the
completion of its useful lifetime in about ten years from now.

To
begin to do this job, you and your crewmates, after a successful
launch, are going to approach this satellite and snatch it out
of orbit and put it down in the payload bay. Talk us through the
procedures of that day, the rendezvous and grapple and berthing
and talk about what you will be doing as part of the team.

I will be
assisting Jean-François Clervoy…I'm the so-called
R2, or the assistant to the prime robotic system operator, who
is Jean-François Clervoy. I don't have, during this phase,
any role as far as the orbiter systems are concerned but I have
a responsibility as an assistant to Jean-François Clervoy.
In fact, the task of grappling the Hubble Space Telescope, or
any free-flying object in space, and then installing that massive
object inside the capture envelope of small latches in the back
of the cargo bay is a pretty difficult task. Once again, Jean-François
Clervoy has a lot of talent. He could do it all himself, but I
will certainly assist him to provide redundancy and backup to
his operation. It's going to be basically a two-person task to
do this jointly. This is going to be my duty during the capture
of the Hubble Space Telescope. I will have a similar role during
the release of the telescope a few days later.

With
the telescope in place in the payload bay, the next day Steve
Smith and John Grunsfeld will exit the airlock to start the series of spacewalks to keep Hubble in shape, and on that first spacewalk
they're to replace the failed and the ailing gyroscopes. Talk
us through the timeline for that first spacewalk and, in the process,
also explain what you and Mike Foale will be doing inside the
orbiter while Steve and John are outside.

The main
purpose of the first EVA, obviously, is to replace those gyroscopes
because that's the primary task. [If], for some reason or another,
we need to come back early and we can only do one EVA, at least
we will have done that, which is the primary reason why we go
early on this mission. So Steve Smith and John Grunsfeld will have as a first task the [replacement of] these three Rate Sensor
Units, each of which contains two gyroscopes. And their second
task is to work on circuitry for the loading of the battery's
so-called Voltage Improvement Kit they will install, for each
of the batteries Voltage Improvement Kits to improve the efficiency
of loading of the batteries. So that's going to be the first EVA,
which should last about six hours. Mike Foale is going to be the
so-called IV crewmember, the intravehicular crewmember, and, in
a way, like a conductor of a two-person band. He will be directing
the operation from inside the cabin. He has total knowledge of
what has to be done on this EVA, and he has the procedures and
all the cameras in his direct view of what's going on. He will
be directing the operation. I will be assisting Mike Foale during
this IV task. We may have unforeseen events. We may have some
bolts that we try to undo, and the torque will be higher than
we anticipate. We have a full list of so-called "contingency
operations" that we'll be ready to jump in. We'll give guidance
to the crew about what to do in case things happen that were not
foreseen. I'm sure that it will require two persons to do that,
especially if we have problems. We have large sections of our
Flight Data File, of our documents on board, that list all that
can be done in case we have unforeseen problems. So I will be
assisting Mike as an IV crewmember. Of course I will also assist
the EVA crewmembers when they get ready to go out, when they suit
on preparation of the EVA, and when they come back I will assist
in reconfiguring the suits, loading the batteries, recharging
the water, and so on.

Take
us through the timeline and from the point of view of somebody
who's inside the spacesuit this time; tell me what you'll be doing
during this, your first spacewalk.

We'll be
doing the next activities as far as maintenance and repair on
Hubble in the order of priority, and the next activity will be
replacement of the brain of the Hubble Space Telescope, which
is the on-board computer. The computer that is presently on board,
although it was somewhat improved on the first servicing mission
with the addition of a so-called co-processor, is a relatively
old computer that has limited capability in terms of its speed
and its memory capacity. So we'll exchange that computer to a
much more up-to-date computer. That will take an hour and a half
to two hours, and [on] the second part of the EVA number 2, Mike
Foale and myself will replace one of the Fine Guidance Sensors,
which is located in a radial position on board Hubble. Some of
the scientific instruments are axial instruments, but the Fine
Guidance Sensors are in radial position. And these Fine Guidance
Sensors are, in a way, star trackers-they give you an image of
the periphery of the field of view that is being studied by the
Hubble Space Telescope. Now there are a certain number of stars
in that field of view, and the operator on the ground picks up
one of these stars. This is a guide star. We do this for all three
Fine Guidance Sensors, and the telescope always keeps these stars
in the same position within these fields at the periphery of the
science field, at the center of the instrument. This is the way
that Hubble can be maintained through these gyroscopes that I
was talking about before, can maintain a precise attitude in space
to do the science. So, as a summary, EVA number 2 is going to
be computer and Fine Guidance Sensor number 2 exchange.

I'd
like you to take EVA number 2 as an example and give us a sense
of the steps that you have to go through and a sense of the kind
of coordination between the spacewalker and the arm operator to
get these things done. At least for a portion of this spacewalk
will you be on the end of the arm?

That's correct,
yes. In fact, we try to share this position at the end of the
arm because there are certain challenges about free-floating:
always being linked with a tether to the space shuttle and being
at the end of the arm. For EVA number 2 Mike Foale will be at
the end of the arm for the first part, for the replacement of
the computer, and then, I will [be] on the arm for the second
part, for the replacement of the Find Guidance Sensor. Now, it
happened that what we have to exchange on the telescope is normally
located in thermostabilized containers inside the cargo bay. You
can see these boxes which are covered with metal foils for thermal
reasons, and they are also, most of the time, thermally controlled
inside to keep reasonable temperature inside each of these containers.
A typical operation for an exchange of a component on board Hubble
is to remove the component from Hubble after opening the doors.
This is normally done by the EVA crewmember at the end of the
arm. Then, [we] put that component in a temporary location and
go to the thermostabilized container, open the door-and these
doors always have latches, either screw latches or other kind
of latches- take the new component [and] go and install it on
Hubble. Then [we] take the old component that was in a temporary
location and bring it inside the thermostabilized container and
close the door. This is [a] typical operation; for instance that's
what we'll do for the Fine Guidance Sensor, which is a very large
instrument. When we have smaller components like a data transmitter
that will be exchanged on the third extravehicular activity day,
then we can do that swap more easily. We don't need to have a
temporary location for the old components. We can do the swap
directly at the thermostabilized container in the cargo bay. For
a large object like the Fine Guidance Sensor, we need to find
a temporary location for the old instrument. Of course, this is
all done as a well-coordinated ballet between the free-floater
and the EVA crewmember at the end of the robotic arm, and we practice
that a lot in the water. We practice it up to about ten times
the duration that we will have on the EVA. A typical EVA is six
hours, and we practice about sixty or sixty-plus hours in the
water to do that task.

Given
your own experience as an arm operator, now as a spacewalker in
training, do you have a new sense of appreciation for the coordination
between the people inside and the people outside?

I certainly
do. We developed already, before the first servicing mission,
this has been further developed on the second servicing mission
and we refined it this time, all the terminology. And the words
to be used between the EVA crewmember at the end of the arm and
the RMS operator, we want to be very precise. Sometimes you want
to have certain motions, either linear or rotational motions,
with respect to the shuttle's cargo bay, but sometimes you want
to have these changes made, either in position or rotation, with
respect to your own body. When you are very close to the work
site and you want to have access to a certain connector on the
left-hand side, then it doesn't matter what the reference is with
respect to the orbiter as a whole, but you want a reference with
respect to your body or with respect to the work site itself.
So we had to develop all this terminology, so it has been fun
and I think it's working quite well. In fact, I have the feeling
that what we develop here may be useful not only for Hubble, because
that's the main purpose, but useful also for space station assembly.
In a way, what we do is not totally different from some of the
tasks that will be performed for the assembly of the International
Space Station.

You
and Mike Foale are now scheduled to make a second spacewalk on
this mission; again, talk us through the timeline of that excursion
and what your tasks are on this fourth and final planned spacewalk
on this mission.

The main
purpose of this fourth spacewalk is going to be to install some
passive thermal insulation on the outside skin of the telescope.
There is one part of the telescope that is constantly exposed
to the sun, and this part has been more damaged by the space environment
than the part that is in the shadow. There's been more peeling
off and damage of the passive thermal insulation than on the shadow
side. I will install, pretty much like you install wallpaper from
rolls, a new thermal insulation against the surface of the telescope.
We have wires and clips that we'll use in order to affix these
thermal insulation panes into the telescope. That's going to be
the main purpose of the fourth EVA: we have a large surface to
cover so it will take quite a lot of time to do that. We will
also, at the end of that EVA, work on some of the latches. Some
latches are not working properly, door latches on the lower part
of the telescope, the aft shroud of the telescope, and we'll replace
two of the latches [with] new latches that will make it easier
in a future mission to open and close the doors. At the end of
that last EVA, we have to complete a certain number of tasks because
that's going to be the very last EVA of the mission. We have a
certain cleanup task to perform in the cargo bay, which will take
about an hour, before we go back in the airlock.

You
go back in the airlock. The next day, the telescope is to be returned
to its mission and Discovery heads home to the Kennedy Space Center,
having completed another important upgrade to the Hubble. When
you are asked about it, how do you explain how the mission that
you and your crewmates are preparing to fly, in conjunction and
coordination with a lot of engineers and scientists who don't
get to fly as you do, is going to help further the objectives
of space exploration?

I think it
does this first of all, because it gives a new life to Hubble.
As we know, we have no more redundancy as far as the gyroscopes
are concerned, and if we are not doing this mission sooner or
later-we don't know exactly when- a fourth gyroscope would probably
fail. Then, the telescope could not be used any longer to do science.
So in order to preserve our ability to do this first class science
with Hubble we feel it very important to do this mission, to do
it early. So that's going to be, for us, very gratifying to feel
that we serve the scientific objective of the Hubble Space Telescope
through, of course, the replacement of the gyroscopes, [and] also
through the other improvements that we will bring on that mission.
So this is going to be the very first and fundamental benefit
of this mission. It's going to be a new life for Hubble for several
years to come. I think-and I mentioned that already before-that,
to a certain degree, we start to refine the EVR activities from
the shuttle, the combined robotics and spacewalking activities.
Such activities will be typical for space station assembly and
space station maintenance. I remember on the first Hubble Space
Telescope servicing mission in December '93, this was the first
time that we were doing this at a grand scale. It had been done
previously but only for a relatively simple operation. But the
whole first servicing mission of Hubble was devoted to a combination
of robotics and EV activities to do major repairs and maintenance
on a free-flying object in space. I think, from a Hubble Space
Telescope maintenance mission to the next one, we make improvements,
and I think this serves, not only Hubble, but it serves also the
whole human spaceflight community, mainly in the area of maintenance
and repairs of anything in space, including the space station.
And I think a third benefit is that we try to put it up in a short
time. From the decision to do this mission until we fly, it's
six months and one week or so, so it's [a] very short time. It
is going to be an experiment of how it works, and I see I have
all reasons to believe that it will work fine. But it's a short
time. And we also have [pushed] the envelope here a little beyond
what has been done in the past. So, three benefits, to summarize:
the benefit to Hubble, the benefits to EVR activities, or extravehicular
and robotic activity, joint activities in general, and an experiment
about preparing for a mission in [a] relatively short time. It's
not only us, it's the whole team getting ready for this mission:
the whole training team, the flight control team, the support
team for the Goddard Space Flight Center, the management team.
This is a challenge, but we'll make it.

Greetings

Click
on the image to hear Claude Nicollier's greeting.
Mission Specialist, STS-103.French
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